"Writing is a Process"


Writing the Mod 2 research article was hard. It was hard to put a story together when I wasn’t concerned about the goal of the module at every step. It was hard to try to write new code in R to find cool things to add to the report. It was hard to read the whole thing once I was done. It took me almost 2 hours to do it. It was hard to sit down and write it—I’m not a fan of writing, and I get really confused by writing down what my mind is saying onto paper. It was probably the hardest assignment I’ve done to date, but I’m really proud of myself for doing it with a lot of help along the say.

I met with the Comm Lab twice last week. Once to help me get my story together and once to review the (almost) final product. It was very helpful, and they heled me get past the “writer’s block” I was feeling. I think I emailed the 109 instructors more than once a day for the whole week. But they were always really helpful and answered my questions J

I realized that I really like making figures and analyzing data, but I really really don’t like writing things down. I found myself staring at my computer for an hour thinking of how to write something down in a way that would make sense (hopefully it did). 

Right before submitting it, I realized that my article was a page over the limit. Don’t ask me how I didn’t realize that 24 hours before. But I carefully made sure that my paper was always 14 pages long…except I don’t know how to count…so now I know not to rely on my simple math abilities. I was in a frantic rush to get my paper down to 14 pages, and I think (hopefully?) I succeeded?

Looking back, I’m glad that we had to write the research article. It taught me a lot about the writing process.

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